Wendell Berry’s life on Earth

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and BPR, a public radio station serving western North Carolina. ​ Wendell Berry made his choices and stuck to them. He did not have a computer or a smartphone. He wrote more than 50 books of poetry, fiction, and essays, mostly with a pencil and paper, from his farmhouse in Henry County, Kentucky. , the 92-year-old had lived many lives — as a farmer, teacher, philosopher, environmental activist — and inspired several generations of writers, farmers, and advocates in turn. Plant sequoias. / Say that your main crop is the forest / that you did not plant.” Grist thanks its sponsors. To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. Here's How The language of activism was often at odds with Berry’s worldview. It seemed to warn of a coming apocalypse, but to Berry, the world had no end and no beginning. To move in nature’s time meant to think in cycles of death and rebirth, not a straight line leading toward destruction or salvation.  That didn’t stop Berry from engaging with activism even when it frustrated him, said Jeffrey Bilbro, an English professor at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, who’s written several books on Berry.  Berry was arrested in 1979 for protesting a nuclear plant in Indiana. In 2011, he was arrested again during a sit-in inside Kentucky state government offices while protesting mountaintop removal coal mining. He remained active in the fight against coal throughout the 2010s, helping to block the gates to a coal-fired power plant in Washington, D. C., and pulling his papers from the University of Kentucky after the school accepted a $7 million donation from Alliance Coal. After Berry wrote his essay in Harper’s Magazine, “Why I am not Going to Buy a Computer” in 1987, some called him a Luddite. As a Grist article in 2014 pointed out, he was, in perhaps the truest sense, taking after that early 19th century movement, when textile workers at the advent of industrialization destroyed machinery to protect the dignity of their work. Berry refused, as much as he could, to let technology alienate him from his work. For this, he was sometimes criticized or called a curmudgeon. Read Next The summer we love is slipping away Grist staff His views didn’t fit neatly into modern politics. He believed that marriage and family strengthened community ties, but didn’t believe the government had authority to legislate such things.